What I said to the members [of Congress] who hoped they would be chairmen: let's don't have that problem. Be thinking now about legislation that you have, preferably that enjoys some Democratic support because we certainly didn't think we were going to have 60 and we don't.

For everybody who thinks it's warming, I can find somebody who thinks it isn't.

We hear the stories every day now: the father who puts on a suit every morning and leaves the house so his daughter doesn't know he lost his job, the recent college grad facing up to the painful reality that the only door that's open to her after four years of study and a pile of debt is her parents'. These are the faces of the Obama economy.

I think there were two messages in last year's election. One is pretty obvious. People were mad as hell at the president [Barack Obama] - and wanted to send a message. We all got that. Our new members were also hearing, and I was hearing as well, that people didn't like the fact that the Congress was dysfunctional. Now they may have been confused about where the dysfunctionality was cause the president kept pointing to the House. Factually, that's not accurate. The dysfunction was in the Senate.

It seems with every new day, we have a new veto threat from the president.

All Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech. We now have, I think, the most free and open system we've had in modern times.

As the leader of the Republicans what I'm telling that we elected the president to be president. It's time for him to step up to the plate and lead us in the direction of reducing our excessive spending.